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Sergei the Great
Unlike Richard Morrison (April), my music tutor wasn’t at all scathing about Rachmaninov. He simply never mentioned him – the true successors of Tchaikovsky and The Five were Scriabin, Shostakovich and Prokofiev. Why? I can only suggest that in terms of the development of musical composition they offered something completely new, especially in terms of structure, rhythm, language and tonality. Yet Rachmaninov was far from being the only 20th-century composer whose music was arguably rooted in 19th-century Romanticism. Richard Strauss, for example, was the absolute master of the big heart-rending tune. He developed German opera post-Wagner into a new
